


Mary, Melusine, Mary, Medea (The Life as a Spinning Wheel Remix)

by Chandri



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-14
Updated: 2010-05-14
Packaged: 2017-10-09 12:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chandri/pseuds/Chandri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John knows that the best way to protect yourself is to be rooted; to be known. But John's never been very good at letting himself be known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mary, Melusine, Mary, Medea (The Life as a Spinning Wheel Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vanitashaze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitashaze/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Mary, Melusine, Mary, Medea](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/780) by Vanitashaze. 



> Vanitashaze's prefacing notes for this story read: _I swear to God, this story kicked my ass._
> 
> ...in retrospect, this is a warning I should have taken more seriously.
> 
> There's this really creepy question in the original story that I kept spying out of the corner of my eye: do people get taken, or do they just disappear? Is something sinister happening, or is it just... one of those things? My John isn't quite sure whether it's all in his head or not, or if he even believes his metaphor's a metaphor, but he's not taking any chances. He's practical that way.
> 
> Also I had two actual nightmares about smashed pumpkins and looking for someone lost in the woods, so thanks for that, Vanitashaze. ;)

Once, John and five friends borrowed a car and went on a road trip. He doesn't remember whose car it was, or where they were going. If they were going anywhere. But they were teenagers, young and stupid and confident, and they were sure that they'd find somewhere, some way, some adventure.

They played loud rock music - looking back, he thinks he remembers hearing Bad Religion blasting out of the tape deck, Abigail shouting into the back seat over the chorus to Sensory Overload - and stacked six-packs of terrible beer in the back seat. They drove out into the countryside, let the wind take them where it willed. John chose the direction, like he always did. People trusted him. His friends trusted him.

He doesn't know whose idea the pumpkins were - knows it was October and chilly as it grew darker, and carving Jack-O-Lanterns seemed like a brilliant plan. They rescued them from an abandoned garden and drove out into a cornfield, cutting faces into their smooth orange flesh. By the end they were a mess, covered in pulp and seeds with sweet-smelling pumpkin guts in their hair and under their fingernails. They'd been drinking for a while by then, and everything seemed thrillingly, impossibly real. Impossibly present. They bitched about their parents and swore never to grow old and Nancy, legs pulled up underneath her with her arms around John, asked what he wanted to do when he grew up.

"I think I want to help people," she told him.

"I want to fly," John answered. He'd never been brave enough to tell his father that. Patrick Sheppard had other plans for his eldest son.

John was sleepy, probably drunk. Bill and Janet and Abigail were laughing about something John couldn't hear. In the stubbly cornfield, Will spun round and round with his arms out, giggling drunkenly, stripping clumsily out of his shirt. Any minute now, he was going to be totally naked except for a plastic Halloween mask and it was too bad nobody had thought to bring a camera. The stars were bright and sprawling. John looked up and felt unmoored from the Earth, adrift in them.

He remembers that night, feeling like the sky was endless and so were his options - like the future stretched out ahead of them in gleaming, endless brightness.

He believed it until he woke from half-drunken drowsiness to Will's absence. He remembers, with all the clarity of a nightmare, the descent from comfort and invincibility fast and hard down into chaos and everything coming messily apart with the abruptness of a pumpkin split in the road. Will was gone, and no one knew where.

John's last memory of Will is of him naked and running, arms outspread as though about to take flight into the dark.

***

Adukkalil disappears on a Sunday night, or at least what passes for Sunday in Atlantis. John doesn't know how long it is before anybody misses him, but he doesn't feel guilty about that. That not his job.

His job comes in twenty minutes later, after Rodney's stormed out of the lab, down to where Adukkalil's meant to be working. When he comes back, his mouth is tight and his face is screwed up in his "worried, but not letting on in front of the peons" expression. John's muscles all go tense; that look on Rodney's face is a red alert to his nervous system. Rodney's quiet worry is worse than most people screaming bloody murder.

Simpson says something about the radios - they've been acting weird for days, something Rodney's been at his wit's end trying to fix, blaming it on everything from atmospheric pressure to some weird polar effect. But it's no good; John already knows this is worse than that, knows it in some part of his brain that remembers shivering in an empty cornfield for hours.

He used to wonder sometimes how other people imagine it - the place missing people go. Do parents with missing kids picture it as a man without a face? Do kids whose parents never come home imagine them fading like fog on a window pane? John's always imagined it as a living thing. If it's a place, it's a place with desires and intentions, with a dark mouth for a door that opens and takes and eats and disappears again. He's had the image in his head for so long that he's no longer sure if it's a metaphor or a coping mechanism or a thing he really believes.

Really, he doesn't suppose it matters.

It's opened its mouth somewhere in his city. John knows they won't find Adukkalil. So does Rodney. John doesn't ask how; there are some things they've just never talked about. Maybe it got someone and he knew them. But no one ever comes back, once it takes them. Car abandoned at the side of the road, purse in a ditch, scarf tangled on a bush in the desert. Gone beyond forty-eight hours, beyond human reckoning.

So it's taken Adukkalil. Somehow, he knows this.

The difference now is that he's got guns, and he's got people, and he's got no intention of letting this go until he knows how, and when, and where, and he's made sure that whatever door it used is shut for good.

That's how you fight, he's learned. By knowing all you can know. That's how it loses its power over you.

He looks across the lab, sees Rodney talking to the latest rescue party returned from an outer arm of the city. There are four teams out now, and neither John nor Rodney have slept in a day and a half. They've gone longer, and John knows Rodney won't sleep until they're done. Just for a moment, Rodney looks up and meets his eyes, and something almost like a smile passes across his face before he goes back to berating the two-scientist, two-Marine team yawning around the end of a lab bench.

That's the other way to fight it, John knows. By being known.

***

John never knew how long they waited, and he felt guilty about that for years - felt he should have been keeping track. It was (maybe) half an hour before they got worried, the night growing colder and eerier around them. An hour (probably) before they started calling out for Will, first quiet and impatient and then loud and angry, because they were getting cold and wanted to go home. Possibly two hours before Janet lost it and started screaming, fingers in her hair. Before Abigail left them there, car speeding off into the dark to look for cops after five o'clock in the middle of nowhere. Then they waited, silent and shivering, jumping at every noise and shadow. The empty field was emptier now, different: a hostile, hungry wilderness pressed in against their backs, that wanted their bones.

It had eaten Will whole.

The police gave up a day later, maybe two. The five of them had waited, tense and numb, through all of it. The lights and noise of the search had washed them clean, no   
answers for the police or their parents. Just, "he was drunk," and then "he was gone."

He knew then - understood it, for the first time since his mother had died - that any moment's peace hung by only the feeblest thread, just waiting for the wrong moment to snap. Back then, he didn't know he was supposed to be watching.

Sometimes that's what Atlantis feels like. A beautiful dream, the impossibility of a frozen, shining moment, with the nightmare always lurking in the darkest parts of shadows. Like the wind whistling under the door when the breeze turns.

***

He checks in with Rodney probably more often than he needs to. With Teyla and Ronon, too, once they've returned to the city and been briefed on what's going on. This is something else John has learned - that at any given moment, anyone can snap loose and be snapped up, gone from sight and knowing. That the only way to be safe is to be anchored. To spin yourself into threads and tying them to things, to people. To be close to people. To be known.

John's never been very good at letting himself be known.

But the others do it, too. The Marines and the scientists, too, though they're often at odds and usually feuding. Most notable is Rodney, maybe because to John, everything Rodney does is notable. Rodney's standing closer, his warmth a shock against John's side. Ronon and Teyla don't object when he insists the team rest together, stay together, when they're not searching.

Maybe it's instinct, John thinks. Maybe deep-down it's something the hind-brain knows - that the world is a hungry thing, always with an eye on the weak ones, the untethered ones.

John is always very careful not to mention these theories to Heightmeyer.

It's better that they not know, anyway. That every time one of his people is in danger, he remembers feeling like the wilderness was pressing in on him, just waiting for him to turn his back. That whenever something like this happens, the first thing he thinks is that he'll die, he'll fucking die before losing even one more person to that darkness in his head.

***

On Wednesday they gathered at John's house, and there they sat nervous and unsure for a long time. Will's absence was like a hole in the room, an unnatural silence. Janet was hollow-eyed and silent, fingers clenched in the hem of her school jacket. Nancy lay back against the couch cushions, eyes closed and face pale. Bill paced in front of the window, clenching and unclenching his fists. Abigail just kept shaking her head.

The room was still and funerareal. John was not. John was coiled like a spring, and knew it was up to him to do whatever came next.

"We should go look for him," he finally said, all in a rush with his heart pounding. It felt right. It felt necessary.

"Are you fucking nuts?" Bill snapped, and John had seen this coming, because Janet and Abigail looked scared and resigned respectively, and Bill was no longer listening.

In the end, it was him and Nancy who went. They drove out to the field, parking the car and walking in a straight line, not really knowing where they were going. The fierce hot certainty that drove him to go, go, look, do something was waning by then, leaving only the chilly drizzle and the darkening sky. John led, letting his feet take him in a crooked, wandering line, until they fetched up at the top of a rise past a rusting billboard. There, the ground sloped down from a cluster of ancient, scraggly oaks, disappearing into the dark.

And there he stopped, because the feeling of purpose had gone, run out of him like water. He stood there, grasping after it, not sure what to do next.

But then Nancy said his name, voice flat and empty of feeling, and John didn't even have to look at her. He just looked up.

Will's mask was there, hanging empty from a branch not even an arm's-length above his head.

***

"You never told me where you grew up," Rodney says suddenly on the second day of city-wide emergency. They're more or less alone in the lab. Simpson's working in the corner with headphones on, tapping her foot and drumming her fingers against the keyboard edge, and Ronon and Teyla are dozing together against a wall, wrapped up in Ronon's huge leather coat.

"No," John agrees. "I didn't." He knows it's the wrong thing to say, but it's a reflex.

Rodney glares at him. Rodney knows what he's doing. Somehow Rodney always knows when he's full of shit, which is a skill even Nancy never mastered. John feels bad about it, because he knows why Rodney's asking. Well; he knows one of the reasons, anyway. This is what people do, even Rodney: they try to connect.

"Why all the sudden questions, buddy?" John asks, and he doesn't mean it to sound like a challenge, no matter how many times he's wanted to. "You writing a book on me, too? Think you have a _unique insight_ into me?" He can't help himself; he leans closer, and Rodney looks furious, though he doesn't yell like he usually does. When he speaks, his voice is low and tight, and somehow John missed seeing they were coming up on this.

"Look, I'm not trying to make you talk about - about your feelings, or anything, god forbid. But I feel like I don't know anything about you sometimes, and that just seems like - _somebody_ should know them, and I think that of all people I - would you STOP THAT?" he yells at Simpson, interrupting himself.

"Sorry," she says, and stops tapping.

Then Rodney's quiet for a while - or maybe he isn't and John's just too distracted enumerating the weak ones in his head, the ones likely to come loose.

"Small town," John says, like a peace offering. "Kind of wealthy. Not very interesting."

"Hm," Rodney says, arms crossed. John glances over at Ronon and Teyla, both sleeping or pretending to. He wishes he could keep everyone in this room with them, but he can't think of an excuse. If he can see them, nothing can happen to them.

And there have been two days of waiting and pacing and searching, so maybe he's just out of energy to panic when Rodney says it. Maybe that's why his heart doesn't pound.

"I really want to kiss you right now," Rodney says softly.

John looks up, but of course, Rodney is careful - Simpson's got her headphones back on and Teyla and Ronon are sleeping. Rodney's always careful, about everything.

This should be a bigger moment. But it's okay that it's not.

Rodney's looking at him, eyes wide and worried, like he didn't really mean to say that out loud. Sleep deprivation wipes out the few verbal filters he's got. But John decides to be kind.

"Yeah, buddy," he says. "Me too."

And that... was a lot easier than he's always thought it would be.

Rodney's whole body twitches as if to stand, but he stays in his seat, a safe arm's-length away. "Can I?" Eager and unsure and exhausted.

And John wishes they could, but: "No. Later. Okay?"

Rodney studies him a moment, but then he grins a brief, incredulous grin, there-and-then-gone. Like he doesn't really believe John, but he appreciates the lie.

That's almost enough.

John hands him a sandwich and thinks about going on another sweep. Rodney comes and sits next to him, their elbows on the table, almost touching. Rodney always keeps the lab morgue-cold and John appreciates the reflected body heat.

"We're not going to find him, are we?" Rodney asks, or doesn't ask. It's not really a question.

"We'll find him," John says immediately. And he means it, though maybe not for the words so much as the sentiment. "We don't leave anybody behind." He nudges Rodney's shoulder with his own, willing him with all his might to believe this, at least this, if nothing else.

He says it with such conviction that for a second, even he believes it. Rodney stares at him for three long blinks before nodding.

"Right," he says. "Of course we don't."

***

On the third morning of city-wide emergency, John gears up to go out on another search and watches Rodney putter around in the lab, about to try something new - some new fix for the sensors, some new scan. Something. Rodney's always got another idea.

John's always got the same one. All John wants is the people he cares about, the place he's chosen, and to be left alone otherwise. It makes him feel selfish sometimes, but he has to work hard to feel bad about it.

He steals Rodney's coffee cup and downs the last mouthful and puts it back where he got it and gets only a frown for his trouble. Anybody else might lose a hand, and that's kind of touching.

"You really do know me better than anyone else, you know," he tells Rodney.

Rodney looks surprised, stunned into immobility, for all of three seconds. Then he smiles, a real one, not sarcastic or fleeting or unsure. "That's kind of pathetic," he tells John.

And John grins back. Behind Rodney the sun is coming up. John feels fierce and strong and ready; he wants to throw open all the windows in the city and scour away every shadow with bright Lantean sunlight. Make it so there's no place for the wilderness to hide.

In that moment, sharp and shining and clear, he believes it can be done.


End file.
